Every photo from the tournament in one place, the ones from the parents along the pitch included

Why does nothing usable come out of the team app?

Because the photos are not missing, they are only in the wrong place. On a tournament day with eight teams the photos sit in eight separate chat groups. The tournament committee is in none of them, the website has nothing, and after two weeks it has all scrolled away under the messages about lifts and changing room keys.

There is a second problem you only notice when you want to print something. A photo that has been through a chat group arrives compressed, too small for a poster in the canteen. For your own timeline that is fine. For the club magazine or a banner at the championship match it is not enough.

What is different from a wedding?

The setup looks like the one for a wedding: one code, one album, people uploading from their own phone. Four things work differently at a club, and those four decide how you set it up.

• Your photographers are parents, not guests. They stand along the line, they mostly photograph their own child, and they are gone the moment the last match ends.
• The same people come back next season. What you agree now about consent applies again then, so arrange it once at registration instead of at every tournament.
• There are children in the pictures. For a member under sixteen the parent gives consent, and that is not a formality you settle with one line in the club rules.
• There is a customer for the pictures. The website, the newsletter or the club magazine wants images afterwards, and that is a different purpose from an album for the parents themselves.
• There is no couple. At a wedding it is clear whose album it is. At a club it is the club, and the club is volunteers doing this on the side.

How do you set it up? Four steps

1. 01Choose the structure before you create anythingOne day with group stages: one album per tournament day. A season that runs on: one album per team. You can have several albums side by side inside the same event, so you do not have to choose between clarity and cost.
2. 02Appoint one administrator, by nameNot the board and not the committee, but Karin from the results desk. She takes photos down when somebody asks and she downloads the zip. Put that name on the poster as well, because then a parent knows who to go to.
3. 03Hang the code where people stand still, and put it in the appThe canteen by the till, the results desk and the corridor to the changing rooms. Put the same link in the team app: the parent getting coffee at half past eight scans the poster, the parent who gets home at four does not.
4. 04Do not close the album at the end of the dayThe uploads run on well into Sunday, when people go through their camera roll at home. Leave it open for at least two weeks and send one reminder in the team app halfway, with the link in it.

And what about the children from the other team?

This is where tournament committees get stuck, and the question is a fair one. Your photos of the final have the team from Woerden in them, their parents are in the background, and you never asked any of them anything. Pretending it is arranged does not help you, because the first time a mother rings, it is your problem.

What clubs do in practice: a sign at the entrance saying that photos are being taken, wide shots instead of portraits of one child, an album behind a link instead of on a public website, and one name people can go to to have a photo taken down without explaining themselves. We have written up the legal side separately, with what the Dutch DPA (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens) says about it and where the line runs.

If you want it tighter, turn on approval. Then no upload joins the album until the administrator has seen it. That costs somebody an hour on Sunday morning and it is the only way to know in advance what is in there. What you do if something slips through anyway is written up separately.

What do you do with the photos after the tournament?

Three things, in this order. Download the whole album as a zip first, because that is the version you will still have in five years. Only then pick the photos for the website or the club magazine, and while picking, look at who is recognisable. Leave the album open meanwhile, because parents come back to find their own child.

How long you can reach it depends on the plan: the active period runs from thirty days to a year, counted from the first time you publish. If you want a photo book made in December, download in September. A printer wants the original files and not a screenshot out of an album.

And where those files sit in the meantime is a real question for a club, because you are recording what your members' children look like. The storage is on European servers and the files are never open on the internet: every link is signed and expires by itself.